LaurenDaviesProjects.com

ArtPractical/Rubbernecking issue

Siege Group Show

March 18 - May 8

Kala Art Institute Gallery

by Brian Andrews

http://www.artpractical.com/review/siege/

East Bay Express

Gimme Shelter

House-hunting apres le deluge

DeWitt Cheng

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/gimme-shelter/Content?oid=1668586

Lauren Davies at Ampersand

Art in America, by Mark Van Proyen

Lauren Davies's recent exhibition, titled "Dominion," consisted of eight three-dimensional works and a pair of large, unframed digital prints on canvas replicating antique French maps of Africa. Petting Zoo/Pongo (2005) and Ivory Products (2006), the two largest works, are homemade display cases with contents that look as if they are awaiting completion as natural-history museum dioramas by momentarily absent makers. The objects within are of an enigmatic character, a quality enhanced by their juxtaposition to each other; among them are grapefruit-sized stones partially covered with spray-foam snow, animal tusks carved from bars of soap and work gloves presented in a state of transformation into unconvincing gorilla paws. There are also cryptic written annotations, some typographically formal and others scrawled on notepaper in a way that suggests a secret instruction to whoever might be tasked with finishing the tableaux.

Of course, in grand Duchampian fashion, it was the viewer who was called upon to complete the story implied by this reliquary display of semi-related clues. Complicating matters was the fact that another six objects were placed around the gallery as if to suggest that the whole exhibition should be read as a diorama--a much larger one containing both the disquieting objects and the viewer. All seemed to await, and resist, translation into a codified narrative. Like those inside the cases, the other objects were presented as if they were unfinished. A toy-sized wood carving of a giraffe, for example, titled Whittled Away (2006), was surrounded by shavings, as if left over from its incomplete manufacture.

The digital prints, titled Dominion: Africa Maps (2006), contributed to an interpretation of the exhibition. Presented in a tattered condition, the classroom-style maps seemed the remnants of a vanished geography of colonialism, conjuring the troubled sleep of a guilty history. They recast the other objects as the components of a failed attempt to rationalize the fantasy of what was once called the "Dark Continent." What we are left with are residual fragments of the border zone between fact and willful misrecognition, a frozen moment in the slow dissolution of a childhood memory of something that never was.

Artist Profile: lauren davies

Art Ltd., September 2008

lauren davies

by dewitt cheng

The work of San Francisco artist Lauren Davies harks back to her childhood visits to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museums, old-fashioned emporia of art, natural history, and science. She remembers "lots of time spent sketching dioramas with camels and leaping tigers and that sort of thing. My summertime activities involved making little scenes out of mud and twigs inside of shoe boxes for the salamanders I would catch in the stream." The mock dioramas that she makes now from unlikely household objects ("flleecy acrylic blankets, bath mats and used carpeting...mixed with hardware store supplies, sheet rubber and spray foam insulation"), fake or unfinished, and hilariously not of traditional museum quality, build on nostalgia for those musty specimen cases. In doing so, they also add a postmodern frankness about -and delight in - artifice. 

In 2007, Davies traveled to southern Newfoundland in a vain search of sublimity: Twillingate was a traditional fine vantage point for viewing newly calved icebergs as they drifted off from their mother ice shelf, but the migratory spectacle, perhaps due to global warming, was disappointing. Wandering into the town's museum, the artist found a polar bear cub, badly stuffed, displayed amid local crafts and manufactures. Alive, it had swum landward from a shrinking ice floe and been confusedly shot: dead, it lives on, a monument to small-town "sad earnestness." Davies' show this spring at San Francisco's Gallery 16, "When Hell Freezes Over," examined that cultural transformation by presenting an eyeless, fur-coated bear surrounded by yellow-stained snowballs of dubious purity.

A previous series, Dominion, shown at Ampersand Arts, also in San Francisco, examined the same cultural process, but in this case using Africa as seen by French colonials. Provoked by a mildewed antique classroom map replete with the names and boundaries of vanished countries, Davies fabricated pseudo-dioramas containing quilted birds, gorilla hands made from pigskin gloves and impaled on sticks, and elephant tusks fabricated from Ivory soap bars. On the floor sat her replica of a chimpanzee "enrichment device",a zookeeper-constructed artificial termite mound full of retrievable food, designed to keep our nearest relatives busy. Davies' is a double simulacrum: a fake fake (like Zhan Wang's metal boulders) designed for our enrichment.

One could of course construe most human culture, including art, as full of shoddy contrivance, but Davies views culture complexly. Like many serious artists, she's aware of the ultimate absurdity of her own enterprise, yet committed to it. Like late-Victorian explorers who mapped the unknown corners of the world, bringing back trunk loads of fauna and flora, she is an indefatigable seeker. She has said, "I love researching things - going down endless topical rabbit-holes that lead to more strange stories with accompanying pictures. Collecting old books, digging up oddball images to help formulate ideas for the installations ... constantly scouting for new materials or alternate uses for old materials. Nothing is too lowly or obscure..." 

Unlike such bygone hunter-gatherers as Frank Buck and Teddy Roosevelt, however, Davie's aim is not to "bring 'em back alive" or skinned and taxidermy-ready, but to explore the intellectual impulse to "master" reality by modeling it. She invests her jerry-rigged animal pastiches with an emotion generally alien to postmodernism - pathos -and this pathos extends not only to the traditional stuffed animal subjects, but also to their makers, with their physical and cultural limitations. "Everything is equivalent," as Davies declares, if we can see without prejudice. Her work rejects the ironic air of detached superiority that infects so much late-capitalist culture, and declares the roles of prey, hunter and taxidermist merely notional and contingent, as if the Creator, hairless and bipedal, had suddenly remembered something and left in a hurry.


"Dirtball," 2006 
Mixed media model of a dirtball covered with snow on a digitally printed map on Colonial Africa




Lauren Davies' show, "When Hell Freezes Over" was on view at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, from April 11 - May 31. Her new series, "The Breeders" draws on her experience as a junior handler in dog competitions. These replicas of various canine species, all made to scale with the appropriate dog fur, will be shown as part of a three person show at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the University of California, Davis, September 25 - December 7, 2008. 

She is also working on "The Butterfly and the Tsunami," one of a number of Cool Globes scheduled for exhibit in San Francisco; Davies' globe, riffing on the Ray Bradbury time-travel story, employs images from the California Academy of Sciences Department of Entomolgy and will be shown at the September 27 opening of the new building in Golden Gate Park.

Cheng, DeWitt, "Artist Profile: Lauren Davies", Art Ltd., September 2008

ART REVIEW: KQED ARTS

Lauren Davies: 

Dog Models

By Victoria Gannon | Nov 08, 2008

Imagine "cute" as a place. It would be populated by kittens and puppies that never age, bunnies that hide brightly colored eggs, and impossibly chubby cheeked infants who never soil their diapers or cry all night long. Such a world, soft and full of happy endings, is a refuge from the one we live in, where accidents occur, bad guys often win and forgiveness is rare. Our collective desire for this fantasy world manifests itself in our popular culture and even in our relationships with our pets. Dogs starring in movies, uncomfortable pet costumes, kitten calendars -- too often our domesticated animals become victims in our pursuit of "cute."

Lauren Davies's dog sculptures are not cute. On display at the Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis, through December 7, 2008, Davies's sculptures take anthropomorphism to an absurd extreme. Made of shed dog fur collected from pet groomers, the small models (they range from 7-by-8 to 17-by-14 inches) are closer to taxidermy than the stuffed animals that crowd toy store shelves.

Davies does not craft generic dogs, or even mutts, but specific, built-to-scale breeds -- the Maltese, the Australian Shepherd, the West Highland White Terrier, the Shetland Sheepdog. Fur is carefully arranged into appropriate color patterns -- Davies's Australian Shepherd has the characteristic brown coat with black patches. Her Old English Sheepdog's fur is realistically matted and curled. The sleeping Cocker Spaniel is a dormant puddle of curled auburn fur. I wanted to ignore the sign and touch the dogs. Would I feel a warm, breathing belly underneath that familiar fur? I snuck a quick pinch, a brush of a leg, and it was cold.

As animated as Davies's creations are, they haunt more than they charm. Lacking eyes, noses, and mouths, they are faceless reproductions filled not with organs but with fur. Significantly, Davies builds the animals from the undesirable part of the dog. Shedding is the seedy underbelly of dog ownership. Shed fur snowballs beneath beds and in corners, upsetting clean houseguests; it coats black clothing and car seats, deterring passengers. Unlike rabbit fur, it is not spun into wool or knit into sweaters. It is thrown away.

Davies uses dog waste to create ghosts, models too real to be cute. In doing so, she mocks our culture's desire to turn pets into malleable stuffed animals with human needs and characteristics. Her sculptures both tempt and thwart our impulse to view pets as cuter versions of ourselves. It is a human impulse, this desire for another version of our world. For in the land of "cute," death and dust bunnies have no home.

Lauren Davies's Dog Models is included in the exhibition Aggregate: Three One-Person Shows, which also includes work by artists Laura Breitman and Camille Utterback. The exhibition is on display at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, located in Room 124, the Art Building, at UC Davis, through December 7, 2008.

RESOURCES

Richard L. Nelson Gallery

Gannon, Victoria, "Art Review: Lauren Davies, Dog Models",  KQED Arts, November 8, 2008

San Francisco artist Lauren Davies 

works on her "Cool Globe" as part

of a San Francisco public art project.

Reyhan Hamanci, San Francisco Chronicle

Photo by Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle

Cool Globes challenge: Getting stuff to stick to a giant ball

See video at:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/04/DDS911TBAP.DTL

When Bay Area artist Lauren Davies got her globe - that is her Cool Globe - it was two weeks late and bigger than she had imagined. It was also, um, spherical, which poses significant challenges in attaching images. "It'shard to tell how long this is going to take," she said eyeing her globe in early June. One large, remarkably detailed butterfly was adhered to it, as many other butterfly cutouts lay nearby. Her workstation, in a friend's  Mission District warehouse, was piled with glossy printed images, with more on her computer screen. Davies who shows widely throughout the Bay Area, was brought into the project by the California Academy of Sciences. Her globe titled "The Butterfly and the Tsunami" takes the "butterfly effect" as its theme - the idea, embedded in chaos theory, that one small change (a butterfly flapping its wings) can initiate huge events (a tsunami or tornado). One side of Davies' globe will have butterflies; the other, tsunamis. "I wanted to have it be a bit abstract," Davies said. "It's taking off on the interconnectedness of everything ... not super scientific or literal." Davies was required to use the Academy's resources in her globe, which she says was a "joy." She used digital images from the Academy's collection, along with those of a butterfly specialist in Seattle. the swirling weather patterns on the other half of the globe are from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

San Francisco Chronicle, April 24, 2008

Faux taxidermy; 'When Hell Freezes Over': Crafty exhibition inspired by 'sad earnestness' of small museum.

Byline: Reyhan Harmanci

Artist Lauren Davies went to Newfoundland two years ago looking for an iceberg. She came back with a polar bear.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. She came back with a project idea about a polar bear, which has grown into her latest solo show, "When Hell Freezes Over."

"I was working on a project on icebergs and I went looking for images. I found this National Geographic calendar that had an iceberg of the month," Davies says. "Apparently, on the southern shore of Newfoundland, you could see icebergs breaking off. I thought I had to go there."

Unfortunately, because of climate change, the icebergs had melted before they reached Twillingate, where Davies was staying. "The guy on the ice boat told us that since we were here, we should check out the museum at the top of the hill. We went up to the little museum and there was a taxidermied polar bear who had been shot and killed about two years prior to that.

"They created this whole museum around this one sad polar bear."

The museum was a mess - next to the polar bear were homemade homages to the icebergs that had put the town on the map, and then just random stuff - jam for sale, infant clothing, thrift-store paintings.

Davies was inspired. She went home and constructed a model of sorts of the museum, with a fake stuffed polar bear, sugar cube icebergs and two digitalized pictures. The result is funny and touching: Davies walks a fine line between parody and celebration.

Davies, who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., and got her master's from the San Francisco Art Institute, says she has always loved natural history museums. A turning point in her work came 10 years ago when she stumbled upon a natural history correspondence course and home taxidermy kit. "It was ridiculous artifice," she says. "It showed you how to make a diorama, like through step A, step B and so on. It was like conceptual art from the '70s."

Natural history has bled into much of Davies' work, which has centered on the boundaries of animal and human life. She says that she finds the craftiness of natural history museums to be very touching. "The thing I took from the Newfoundland museum was that everything is equivalent," she says, "the Styrofoam ice floe is equivalent to the jelly and jam next to it. There's something about this sad earnestness. The museum put this display together with this sad thing made of broken-up bits of Styrofoam, and there was no effort to make it look any more realistic. I love that."

Through May 31. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., S.F. (415) 626-7495. www.gallery16.com.

- Reyhan Harmanci, rharmanci@sfchronicle.com

http://www.sfgate.com/c/a/2008/04/23/NS9J1082P1.DTL

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-8883404/Faux-taxidermy-When-Hell-Freezes.html

Lacy Atkins / The Chronicle